Media Converged

Tech Crunch: Insta-who? Today Facebook begins rolling out Facebook Camera for iOS to English-speaking countries, a standalone photos app where you can shoot, filter, and share single or sets of photos and scroll through a feed of photos uploaded to Facebook by your friends. Developed by Facebook’s photos team without the help of Instagram because the acquisition deal hasn’t closed yet, Facebook Camera looks a lot like the app TechCrunch leaked images of a year ago, and is designed for quicker publishing than Facebook’s multi-featured primary mobile app.

Facebook Camera lets you rapidly pick one or more photos, apply filters, tag friends and locations, add a description, and post. While its 14 filters, batch uploads, and streamlined interface are a big step up from Facebook for iOS, the design isn’t as beautiful as Instagram and neither are the photos you’ll see in it. When asked if Facebook Camera would become a direct competitor to the photosharing network it bought last month, a spokesman told me “As Mark asserted, we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently, so I anticipate some healthy competition.”

Forbes: The list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM (NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years.

Why? because CEOs are beginning to recognize that using email and the phone to get the message out isn’t sufficient anymore.

The big takeaway: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile.

“As CEOs ratchet up the level of openness within their organizations, they are developing collaborative environments where employees are
encouraged to speak up, exercise personal initiative, connect with fellow
collaborators, and innovate,” the IBM study concluded.

Simply put, CEOs and their executives set the cultural tone for an organization. Through participation, they implicitly promote the use of social technologies.  That will make their organizations more competitive and better able to adapt to sudden market changes.

Tech Crunch: “The new revenue model we recently put in place is built around creative brand advertising, which is something that Facebook and Google don’t support,” Karp said. Rather than a/b testing a blue link to try to find the most effective direct response ad, Karp wants brands to use Tumblr to tell stories that create intent on the part of consumers — which is the type of advertising that they want to see anyway.

Also, while much of the available ad space being sold by other Internet companies goes to big brands, Karp sees an opportunity to make inventory available to individual users, who could use the space more effectively, and who might not annoy their friends in the way that brand advertising might.

“We want to make some real estate available not just to big brands, but to carve it out for people that are already a part of the network,” Karp said. “It’s problematic when that American Express post shows up in your feed, but it’s different when it’s one of your friends.”

In addition to talking about the new revenue products, Karp described the organizational transition which recently took place and enabled long-time Tumblr president John Maloney to resign. Tumblr has grown from 15 employees to more than 105 since the beginning of last year. A lot of those hires were made to add senior executives to the staff who could oversee various different parts of the organization. Not only did that allow Maloney to step down, but it also meant that Karp hasn’t really written any code over the last six months.

Ad Age: Google+ launched brand pages six months ago, introducing new social lingo, including “hangouts,” “circles” and “+1s.” But strike up a conversation with a digital marketer these days, and talk of “+1s” has been replaced by that of “pins.”

Rather than challenge Facebook and Twitter for mindshare, Google is a distant fourth to Pinterest, with its “pin it” button now appearing alongside Facebook, Twitter and email buttons on prime web real-estate such as eBay and Amazon product pages.

Even the platform’s “best” brands haven’t put a ton of effort into building out the pages. Nissan, for example, was lauded late last year for having one of the best new Google+ brand pages, even down to the animated GIF in its header image that gives the illusion of a car speeding by. Nearly 424,000 users have added the page to their “circles” (Google+ lingo for following a person or brand) and yet Nissan’s agency decided early on not to invest in developing content specifically for the page, which mostly contains repurposed content from Facebook.

“The bottom line was that it was pretty bleak in its traffic,” said Brandon Kleinman, director of social media and strategy at TBWA/Chiat/Day.

The broad consensus is that Google+ is an empty city where the masses go to set up a profile but then seldom return.

Media Bistro: Gene Morphis has a pretty innocuous social media presence. His Twitter account, @theoldcfo tweets financial observations and musings on politics, but nothing too controversial. He also has a blog with posts about adventure travel and classy cigars, and a Facebook account just like the rest of us.

But the Wall Street Journal reports that his tweets might not have been totally innocent after all, as they’re the cause of his abrupt termination from his position as Chief Financial Officer of fashion retailer Fancesca’s Holdings Corp.

On Monday, Morphis was unceremoniously let go of his position – which had netted him $1.2 million in 2010 and $566,000 in 2011 – because he “improperly communicated company information through social media” while sending out his 140-character thoughts.

Although no tweets were cited specifically, and neither Morphis nor his former employer would comment, the Wall Street Journal dug up some company-related tweets that might have been part of the problem.